In the midst of sweeps, KOMO/4 management abruptly fires three respected reporters.

Fisher Communications-owned KOMO/4 stunned its newsroom by pink-slipping three of its veteran reporters Monday morning.

Kevin Reece, Joe Furia, and North Puget Sound reporter April Zepeda were let go without warning and, curiously, in the middle of the May ratings-sweep period.

“I’m blown away by it,” said Furia, who had been with KOMO for more than a decade. “I thought they were happy with my work, and I had no reason to believe otherwise… Things do evolve. I was just used to evolving with them.”

Zepeda echoed Furia’s surprise. She was called in to the station general manager’s office from her Edmonds home on what was supposed to be her day off.

Reece, who was a weekend anchor for KSTW/11’s newscast until it went dark in 1998, has been the face of KOMO’s late breaking news for most of his eight years with the station.

By Monday afternoon, their biographies and photos had been purged from KOMO’s Web site.

The firings came days after Furia and Zepeda volunteered to assist the newsroom’s bargaining unit. KOMO’s newsroom is part of the Seattle chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Employees reached an agreement for a new contract in mid-March, but station management has not signed off on it.

“This stinks to high heaven,” said John Sandifer, executive director of the Seattle local of AFTRA. “The union takes special note that one employee, April Zepeda, had just volunteered to serve as the shop steward, and Joe Furia had just agreed to assist her only two days before they were fired.”

Furia confirmed that, in response to volunteering to help Zepeda, he received an e-mail from management he described as “unnerving.” He and Zepeda said they do not know if their union-related actions had anything to do with their dismissals.

News director Holly Gauntt declined to comment beyond saying the station does not discuss personnel issues. A spokesman added that KOMO intends to continue covering the North Puget Sound region using other reporters.

In separate interviews, Zepeda, Furia and Reece said management informed them the station was going in a direction that did not include them.

Reporters frequently come and go at local news operations, but firing three in one stroke during May is unusual. Sweeps, the months during which Nielsen Media Research measures ratings data in local markets, are the most important periods in the programming year. Stations use the information collected during November, February, May and July to set ad rates.

During May, prime-time programming finales on the networks – KOMO is the area’s ABC affiliate – have the potential of boosting ratings for late-evening newscasts. Newsrooms usually beef up their coverage and extend their resources to maximum capacity.

Over the past year KOMO has changed its management from top to bottom. President and CEO Colleen Brown arrived in 2005 and named Jim Clayton, a former executive with Fox’s New York owned-and-operated station, vice president and general manager in July 2006. Gauntt became news director in February of this year.

A transformation on that scale almost inevitably means reorganizing and cost cutting. Ridding the ranks of three mid-career reporters may strike outsiders as the height of folly, especially since two of them, Zepeda and Reece, are up for regional Emmys next month. Reece racked up a whopping seven nominations for his work.

But the miserable reality is that when a TV station’s management bases its decisions on the bottom line as opposed to valuing the work of seasoned journalists, awards don’t count for diddly.

Even if these layoffs were planned well in advance of their execution, the timing from a public relations standpoint could not look worse.

Sandifer said the firings “send a chilling message to everyone in the bargaining unit. Therefore, we have begun an investigation into the totality of the circumstances, and the union plans to act appropriately based on those results.”

In spite of the abrupt dismissal, Furia refuses to say anything negative about his former employers, emphasizing that he still respects his good friends working there.

Zepeda said, “It has been a joy. I have absolutely loved it.” Of the three, only Zepeda was working under a contract that binds her to a non-compete clause, which could potentially bench her for several months before she can appear on another station’s local newscast.

“I don’t know if this is it for me,” she said. “That was the hardest part, waking up this morning and realizing, ‘I’m not in news anymore.'”

Reece said he was surprised by how cavalierly it was handled.

“I worked there for more than eight years, and they give you 15 minutes to get out of the building. That’s a bit of an insult,” he said, “but that’s the way it is, and you move on, I guess.”